SOURCE: “Di and Li,” in New Yorker, Vol. 69, No. 29, September 13, 1993, pp. 90-99.

[In the following interview, Trilling and Harris discuss Trilling's life and career.]

It is the fate of notable literary figures to be relegated for safekeeping to a pathetically simple symbolic image in people's minds. However much we may know about the complexity of, say, Ernest Hemingway or H. L. Mencken or Virginia Woolf, there they are, filed away in our overcrowded mental archive like little cartoons: Hemingway in his safari outfit, Mencken in galluses and boater, Woolf in drooping woollens gazing raptly at a moth.

Despite many decades of eminence as a literary and cultural critic, Diana Trilling has eluded efforts to find a catchall image for her. She has managed to slip through the net of this nearly universal process in part because the public's gaze was usually focussed on her more famous husband, the late Columbia University scholar and critic Lionel Trilling, in part because of the insularity of the New York intellectual world she wrote for, and, perhaps most of all, because of the complex contradictions of her persona. A phobia-racked young woman, she quickly became known for the fearlessness of her style; an early trespasser on the traditionally male world of political polemics, she revelled in motherhood and domesticity; a defender of the middle path, she has always been captivated by those who didn't take it.

Inside the contentious, politically fervid New York intellectual circle that was her milieu from the late nineteen-twenties on, there was, to be sure, an “official,” minimalist line on the Trillings, largely based on Lionel Trilling's literary circumspection and both Trillings' apparent imperturbability. But that version, according to Mrs. Trilling, whom I recently visited after reading an unbound copy of her excellent forthcoming memoir, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling, appears to have been almost laughably at variance with the reality of their lives. The memoir has most of the major cultural upheavals of the century as its backdrop, but in writing it Trilling was concerned chiefly with shedding light on heretofore hidden aspects of her private life and her husband's—hence its odd, third-person subtitle. Now that nearly all the intimates who knew her as Di and her husband as Li were gone, there was, she felt, no record of the more personal side of her history, or of the union that Rebecca West once said had no equal in contemporary English literary marriages. Her book joins a lengthening list of opinionated recollections of the heyday of New York intellectual life, the thirties and forties, written by people—Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe, among others—who rarely agreed about much, but most of whom have now passed beyond debate.

Having been forewarned that Mrs. Trilling was in her late eighties, that she was blind, and that she suffered from several debilitating ailments, I arrived at her apartment, on the Upper West Side, anticipating a hushed encounter with a faltering spirit. Instead, I found a determined-looking woman in a dark-blue summer dress who came quickly to the door after I rang the bell, greeted me with her face turned attentively toward mine, and led me so briskly toward a flowered couch in her living room that I rather rudely blurted out, “Oh, you're not blind.”

“But I am, I am, or nearly,” she said, sounding pleased that I thought she wasn't. Trilling is a medium-sized woman with pale skin, elegantly arched high brows, and large brown eyes that are slightly protuberant—a legacy of the hyperthyroidism she suffered from in her twenties. Above her face rises a soft cloud of upswept reddish-brown hair. On the way to the couch, I paused to look at a propped-up copy of her book jacket on a side table, which shows a contemplative-looking Lionel Trilling and a bold, beautiful Diana Trilling gazing expectantly out at the world. Mary McCarthy, who was in Mrs. Trilling's circle from the late nineteen-thirties on, thought she resembled Katharine Cornell. Harking back to the period when Trilling and a number of her women friends swam in the same waters as the Trotskyists, McCarthy also remarked that the Trotskyists had all the beautiful girls. Though Mrs. Trilling cannot make out faces except at very close range in a good light, she can, I discovered, see outlines of bodies, and she noticed that I had lingered near her book jacket.

“Those photographs were taken about the time we were married, in the late twenties,” she said. “I like the jacket. I looked at it under a magnifying lamp that is my savior. Isn't it attractive? Lionel was extremely good-looking. Photographs do not do him justice. They never did. Even in the ones that Cecil Beaton and Walker Evans took of him, he looks hideous.”

Trilling began losing her sight in 1985. Nowadays, she has a secretary who comes in half-days to read to her and help her with her work, and she listens to tapes of books, but, as someone who has lived in books, she has had to undergo a torturous period of adjustment. The memoir took her eight years to complete.

“I had to dictate it, which was a most peculiar process,” she said, looking toward but not at me.

“Into a machine?”

“I couldn't dictate into a machine. I dictated to people. I've had a series of secretaries—seven, in all. It was awfully hard.”

Despite the loss of vision and an advanced case of emphysema (she cannot walk more than a block), Trilling lives alone, in a sprawling Claremont Avenue apartment that has been her home since 1955. In her memoir, the subject of what it was like to be a middle-class literary couple in a combative, radical circle hostile to what Mencken called “the booboisie” looms large. “We were resented, and it was not a small subject,” she said when I asked her about it. “It's inconceivable today, but it turned people against Lionel and me.” The unfashionable subject of class surfaces frequently in Mrs. Trilling's writing, and the terrors, demands, constrictions, and lasting reverberations of an early-twentieth-century middle-class Jewish upbringing are a large part of the story she tells in her memoir, and tells with admirable candor—though, needless to say, her book is more than a portrait of a bourgeois literary marriage.

Trilling was born Diana Rubin, the third child of a poor Polish couple who immigrated to the United States in the eighteen-nineties. Her father, who had grown up in the ghetto of Warsaw, became a manufacturer of braid and prospered rapidly. Her mother brought a wealth of rural Polish folk remedies, superstitions, and habits to her children's upbringing. If the children had colds, she rubbed their feet with garlic; if a speck blew in their eyes, she licked it out with her tongue; and if the cat inconveniently bore kittens, she drowned them in a kitchen pail or had them smashed with a broom under the dining-room table, in full view of her terrified daughter.

In the then far more rural suburb of Larchmont—where the family lived before moving to New Rochelle, then to Brooklyn, then to Manhattan—the Rubins grew their own fruits and vegetables and raised chickens in the back yard. Neither of Diana's parents read books, and no one encouraged her in any intellectual pursuits—or, apparently, in much of anything else. Although she can still vividly recall the sweetness of a peach she ate from the family tree, the pleasure principle, she makes clear, was entirely absent from her upbringing.

“It was a very puritanical household,” she told me. “My parents were strict, and worried about spoiling us. We had few toys. We were never complimented, lest we become conceited. But in my generation, in a certain kind of East European Jewish household, that was the way it was.” She leaned forward as she spoke, with her elbows resting on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her. Trilling's place in her generation is also marked by the cultivated, New York-accented cadences of her speech and the complete sentences in which she expresses even the most ephemeral thoughts.

In her memoir, Trilling speculates that her family's extreme disapproval of any sort of self-display and their subliminally conveyed wish that she not surpass her older brother and slower sister contributed to her slowness in becoming a writer. She was thirty-six before she began writing for publication, and that fact partly explains the modesty of her literary output to date: three collections of reviews and essays—Claremont Essays, We Must March My Darlings, and Reviewing the Forties—and one full-length book, Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor. (“I actually never sat down to write a book until after Lionel died,” she told me. “We don't know what the meaning of that is. …”) That day, it was worrying her that she hadn't made it clear enough in the memoir that her family's obliviousness of her psychological needs and of her fears—of burglars, of lice, of a crazy neighbor—rested on the period's totally different assumption about the personal life. “It wasn't only my upbringing, it was a whole sense of life—you were not that precious.”

Her future husband, also the child of Polish immigrants, was, on the other hand, all but inundated with parental attention. Though as a baby he was overfed to near-bursting, his mother considered him so irresistible to strangers that she felt compelled to pin a “Please Don't Kiss the Baby” sign on his carriage. Trilling père gave up tailoring, which he was good at, to become a manufacturer of fur-lined coats, which he was bad at, solely to spare his son the embarrassment of having to say that his father was a tailor. In Far Rockaway, where Lionel spent part of his boyhood, when he played with his friends in makeshift cardboard houses the other boys' lunches came out of paper bags; his—lamb chops and baked potato—was sent forth on a silver salver. And when he went away to camp Mom and a multitude of aunties moved into a nearby boarding house. At six, he was informed that he would go to Oxford. (He never attended as a student but taught there in 1964 and was a visiting scholar in 1972.) Diana Rubin always believed that her stately first name portended a romantic future; he loathed his (probably the result of a period when his mother lived in England), and never ceased to wish that he had been a Jack or a John.

As a student at Erasmus Hall High School, in Brooklyn, and Radcliffe College, Diana had no sense whatever of her future calling as an intellectual. She had high expectations of college, but found that at the Radcliffe of her day “any intensity of idea bordered on the ill-bred,” she writes in the memoir, and “no one carried back to the dormitory any topic for discussion which had arisen in a classroom.” The object of their education, a college dean told her sophomore class, was to provide mental diversion in their private lives; as they went about their domestic chores in the future, they could recite Keats to themselves. Dorothy Calingaert, a friend from her Radcliffe days, remembers spending many happy hours playing the piano while Diana sang arias in a beautiful, pure soprano voice. But she graduated without having read Homer, Dante, or Chaucer, without adding to her scant high-school knowledge of Shakespeare, and barely knowing the names Montaigne, Tocqueville, Austen, or Hawthorne. She majored in art history, but in her era few Jews even made it into the elite schools, and she was apparently the only student in the art-history department who openly declared herself Jewish, that department being particularly unwelcoming to Jews.

At various points in his life, Lionel Trilling was accused by his critics of being insufficiently Jewish, or, anyway, traitorously assimilationist—a charge that Mrs. Trilling addresses at some length in her book and, I think, succeeds in laying to rest. She also writes, quite movingly, about her own complex feelings about being Jewish, though, like her husband, she grew up in a largely secular home and, like him, “had the childhood of an American who happened to be a Jew, not that of a Jew who happened to be an American.”

She graduated from college in 1925, and arrived in New York with strong recommendations for jobs at the Frick Art Reference Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But her Jewish name apparently outweighed her references, and she never got beyond the front door of either institution. Those rebuffs effectively ended her career as an art historian. However, it was not religious prejudice alone, or even mainly, that thwarted her, she says, but a lack of sense of direction—something she shared with most of the women of her generation.

She was introduced to Lionel Trilling on Christmas Eve in 1927 at a speakeasy in the West Forties by Clifton Fadiman and his wife, Polly, whom both had come to know during their school days. The Fadimans did not actually expect them to like each other, but thought, more or less jokily, that a Lionel and a Diana belonged in the same orbit. They turned out to like each other quite a lot, and two years later they were married. It was “not a case of love at first sight, only of attraction,” she writes. “We were never in love in the way that people are in love in popular songs—for that kind of love I should have had to look outside reality, and, like someone who is muscle-bound, I am reality-bound. Over a long lifetime, we loved each other very much, increasingly with the years, although in middle life we quarreled a great deal and often threatened each other with divorce. But even at our angriest, we were never estranged. … I have never met any man to whom I would rather have been married.”

Their courtship floated along on a virtual sea of brandy Alexanders and a drink called a Bullfrog. “From the moment we met until I became seriously ill after we had been married for a year, neither of us was entirely sober when we were together,” she says. Six months before they married, they became lovers. In later life, Mrs. Trilling fearlessly engaged in any number of battles with powerful literary figures and heavy-hitting political antagonists, but apparently these required nothing like the daring it took to sleep with her future husband. “It was the most courageous act of my life,” she told me. “Mary McCarthy said she had a lover every day after she graduated from Vassar, but no one I knew did anything like that. None of my friends did what I did.”

Lionel Trilling's extravagantly over-attentive immediate family was ruled by a formidable claque of maiden aunts and bachelor uncles, who looked upon marriage as a weakness—a betrayal of family fealty. When Lionel introduced Diana to them, they refused to shake her hand, and when he told his mother that he was actually getting married she fainted, and Lionel's pretty sixteen-year-old sister obligingly fell at her side.

Her wedding does not figure among Mrs. Trilling's favorite memories. The ceremony was conducted by a former college classmate of her husband's who had recently been ordained as a rabbi, and he “insisted” that they be married under a chupah. The fact that this requirement came, as it were, with the job seems to have been underappreciated by the adamantly secular bride and groom. As Lionel was about to step under this ritual object, Diana's father disappeared into the bathroom, and reappeared forty-five minutes later; the bride's wedding bouquet of roses had not been dethorned and pricked her painfully through her wedding-dress sleeve; and the nuptial banquet included a dessert bombe topped by a doll bride with a sugar skirt, which guests were directed to reach under to retrieve little scoops of ice cream.

The first years of her marriage were marked by the onset of a long period of illness and phobias (one was a fear of being alone, and it was so powerful that she briefly had to hire a paid companion), but those years also broadened her intellectual horizons immensely. The crowd her husband became a part of—the Family, as it was later named by Norman Podhoretz—included, in the early years of their marriage and into the thirties, the editors Elliot Cohen, Philip Rahv, William Phillips, and F. W. Dupee, and the Marxist scholar Sidney Hook. “The girls,” as the Trillings referred to them—Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Hannah Arendt—joined the group later. The group came to include, as well, the critics Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, and James Agee, the editor William Barrett, the poets Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell, the editor and writer Irving Kristol, the critic Irving Howe, the sociologist Daniel Bell, and Podhoretz himself. At some unspecified point, Diana Trilling became an integral part of this circle, although at first she was welcomed only as an adjunct of her husband. Few of its members became her close friends. “It was hard to be intimate with anyone in that crowd,” she remarked on another afternoon. “They were so adversarial.”

“Even the women?” I asked.

She gave me a pitying look, and said, “When Mary and Hannah were with us socially, they ignored me totally. They directed their attention only to Lionel.” After a while, the conversation turned to the subject of Mary McCarthy's reputation as a beauty. “Of course, she was enormously good-looking,” she said. “But I did not like her smile. There was no innocence in that smile.”

In histories of the thirties and forties, the New York intellectual crowd comes across as a kind of brilliant, out-of-control Lower East Side schoolhouse gang. Mrs. Trilling's memoir supports this impression. “They were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and they often lacked common courtesy,” she writes. “But they were intellectually energetic to a degree which I had not previously encountered and—this particularly attracted me—they were proof against cant.” Someone once complained to Irving Howe that there had been a lot of professional back-scratching among them. “Change the word ‘back’ to ‘eye,’” he replied, “and maybe you've got something.”

In 1931, during a stay at Yaddo, both Trillings became converted to the Communist cause. By then, most of the people they knew were becoming politically engaged Marxists, and Marxism had joined modernism as the focus of the debates that frequently took place at Stewart's, a cafeteria in the Village. It has been suggested that without Marxism the New York intellectuals would have been dull. Harold Rosenberg went as far as to say that without it they would have been nothing.

Mrs. Trilling and a number of her friends began working for the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a Communist-affiliated organization. Together with a woman who referred to herself as Comrade Grace and to the man she lived with as Comrade Lover, she at first stuffed and licked envelopes (“the women's work of revolutions”), but before long she was given the task of enlisting the signatures and the support of intellectuals for the N.C.D.P.P.'s many appeals. In 1932, a couple she was friendly with came back from a lengthy visit to Russia with horrific tales about bloated commissars and political terror, but at that point neither she nor her husband paid much attention to such stories. She continued to believe in Communism as the best solution for the country's ills, to admire the Party's position on social and racial equality, and, embarrassed but with arm upraised, to sing the “Internationale” at the conclusion of every Party gathering. Her disenchantment with Communism, which grew exponentially as she got older, was triggered by the Party's cynical use of the Scottsboro Boys case to attract publicity and adherents and by what she saw as the Party's indifference to the actual fate of the Scottsboro defendants, evidenced by its hiring of a criminal lawyer with no civil-rights experience. From a fellow-worker she learned that money she had helped raise specifically for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys had been used instead to pay for the Party's national convention. In April of 1933, less than a year after joining the N.C.D.P.P., she and her friends quit, and after a brief period of Trotskyist involvement she joined a growing number of disillusioned radicals.

“But the worst thing about leaving the N.C.D.P.P. had nothing to do with politics,” she recalls today. The office had served as a secure retreat from her phobias. In 1930, Mrs. Trilling had had two operations—she had nearly died after one of them—for hyperthyroidism. (Even after this condition was diagnosed, her father was convinced that her symptoms—extreme fatigue and loss of appetite—had been caused by “sexual excess,” and instructed her brother to speak to her husband about the matter.) She had also begun to suffer from panic attacks and from the various phobias—she was terrified of travelling and of heights as well as of being alone—that would plague her for more than twenty years. A doctor prescribed Luminal, a mild sedative, to help calm her, and she carried it with her in her purse wherever she went. The multitude of fears besieging her had become so extreme that when Whittaker Chambers (unaware that she was about to quit her job) came to her apartment to try to enlist her as a spy for the Russians, she could scarcely think of anything but how flattering it was that anyone would think her brave enough to be capable of spying. Nonetheless, she declined.

Lionel Trilling had been appointed an instructor at Columbia in 1932, but he nearly lost his job several years later when he was “accused” of being “a Jew, a Marxist, and a Freudian.” He survived by sheer force of will, and thereafter began his unwavering ascent to the literary-academic empyrean, where he remained for the rest of his life. At home, however, things were going far from well. The Trillings were struggling to maintain their own household and that of the senior Trillings, who had lost their money in the Crash, and they had already entered the first phase of what Mrs. Trilling described one afternoon as “a lifetime of dreary indebtedness.” Their “public guardedness”—as William Phillips, who was both Trillings' editor at Partisan Review, recently described it—also concealed a cauldron of emotional difficulty. No one knew that Lionel Trilling suffered from ravaging depression and rages.

Shortly before Lionel and Diana were married, his usually adoring mother somewhat mysteriously recommended that she occasionally hit him over the head with a bottle if any strange show of temper manifested itself. “I thought she was mad,” Trilling now says. But during her husband's frequent bouts of depression, she writes, “this most peaceable of men” gave vent to “annihilating verbal assaults” in which he blamed her for all his sorrows—a charge she accepted to some degree, because she felt that her phobias must be a terrible drag on him.

To try to extricate herself from the problems that ensnarled her, Mrs. Trilling began a more than twenty-year adventure with psychoanalysis. It helped her cure her phobias and find the courage to become a writer, but, at least as she describes it, seems like pure opéra bouffe. Over several decades, she consulted seven different analysts. One asked her out on a date. Another, supposedly to keep her fear of being alone at bay, invited her into his chaotic house, where she sat, horrified, as the family pets relieved themselves at will and the baby crawled around petrified bits of old food and dog shit. (This doctor also took on her husband as a patient while treating her, and vacationed with both of them.) A third, “an artist of the counter-phobic,” made her aggressively confront her phobias as if she were a circus performer, and a fourth was addicted to morphine.

Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Trilling believes that she was never entirely properly analyzed. Still, she had better luck with psychoanalysis than her husband did: his two biggest problems, depression and writer's block, eluded the talking cure. Apparently, despite all the respect he was accorded as a critic and the near-reverence he inspired as a teacher, he felt that he had failed as a creative writer (his one novel, The Middle of the Journey, published in 1947, is, in fact, rather leaden) and wished he had been capable of living the more released life that he felt went along with a realized creative spirit. Those who knew him in his academic guise will probably be amazed to learn from the memoir that he “deeply … scorned the very qualities of character—his quiet, his moderation, his gentle reasonableness—for which he was most admired in his lifetime and which have been most celebrated since his death.”

One happy result of Mrs. Trilling's having overcome her fear of venturing forth in the world was the launching of her writing career, in 1941, as a book reviewer for The Nation. In the eight years that she held that job, the front editorial section of the magazine had a pro-Communist bias and the literary, back section was anti-Communist—a situation that prompted one wit to remark, “How can The Nation long endure, half Slav and half free?” Her reviews were unsigned at first, but she soon graduated to longer, signed essays, both in The Nation and in Partisan Review. To her astonishment, she discovered a bold public voice that totally belied her private terrors. When she attended Partisan Review parties now, “it was as if I had all at once acquired new powers of mind or a new endowment of personal charm,” she notes bitingly. “The other writers could talk to me without the fear that they were squandering time that might be used more gainfully.”

The next decades saw Mrs. Trilling's reputation as an incisive literary critic and fearless polemicist grow apace, and brought some extraliterary battles onto the printed page. Although she had written in her introduction to the Viking Portable D. H. Lawrence that “there have been few writers in any era, and certainly none in ours, who have combined as Lawrence did the gifts of the creative heart and the penetrations of the critical intellect,” Alfred Kazin (with whom Lionel Trilling once nearly came to blows in an argument about Mrs. Trilling's politics), criticizing her introduction to a volume of Lawrence's letters, found “Mrs. Diana Trilling,” as he referred to her, incapable of appreciating Lawrence's genius. She continued to write chiefly for small, “advanced” (a word she uses a lot) periodicals, but her audience expanded when she began contributing essays to popular magazines like Vogue, McCall's, Harper's Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. In the late fifties, in an article for Look entitled “The Case for the American Woman,” which she wrote in response to a series the magazine had run depicting American wives as grasping Valkyries driving their husbands to early graves, she said that, on the contrary, American homes were like mental hospitals: American wives were the nurses and their husbands the patients. “A storm of protest followed, and my husband's publisher told him that I was damaging his reputation,” she recalled, with unconcealed glee.

The hallmarks of Diana Trilling's work—whether about Edith Wharton, Norman Mailer, McCarthyism, William Saroyan, feminism, Marilyn Monroe, Timothy Leary, D. H. Lawrence, Alice James, or Tom Sawyer—are lucidity, moral complexity, an unself-protecting, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may staking out of strong positions, and an aversion to received ideas. “She has one of the most generously consecutive minds I have ever known,” says the literary scholar and critic Quentin Anderson, who is also Trilling's friend and neighbor. “Other people aren't continuously working things out,” he said recently. “They have their intermissions. But Diana can't bear intermissions. The experiences which face her have to be stripped of their strangeness and incongruity so that she can make sense of the world. And whether she was writing for Redbook or Partisan Review, there was always a steadiness of judgment. When ‘judgmental’ became a commonly used pejorative adjective, much of Diana was being implicitly condemned, because she demands of herself that she make responsible judgments, and I think that it shows in her work wherever and however it appears.”

One morning in 1947, Trilling awoke to the unnerving realization that she had been married for eighteen years, she was forty-two years old, and she was childless. Childlessness was common in her circle, and somehow, she writes in the memoir, the subject had simply never come up.

I asked her how that was possible.

“I don't know,” she said. “But that's how it was. When I realized my position, of course, I consulted a doctor immediately. He was not optimistic. He said I'd waited too long. Well, he was wrong. I became pregnant that night, and our son, Jim, was born the following July. We loved being parents.”

James Trilling, an art historian who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his family, grew up, he says, with no feeling that there were powerful tensions in his parents' private lives. But he has strong memories of the seriousness, even the “sense of mission,” with which both parents approached their work. “I was aware most of all that my parents talked constantly to each other and they were almost always on the same wavelength,” he said. “Very rarely have I had the impression from another couple that the whole strength of their marriage was right there in the way they talked.”

For more than five decades, Trilling has referred to herself as a “liberal anti-Communist.” Nevertheless, almost uniquely, she has critics on the left who distrust her liberalism and conservative critics who consider her an unreconstructed liberal. Over the years, she has had cause to articulate her political position many times in print. “I was against both Communism and McCarthyism,” she writes in her memoir. “They were enemies of each other but I was the enemy of both. Double positions of this kind are not popular.” She finds “a curious abstractness in the liberal condemnation of anti-Communism, which has become increasingly marked since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” and goes on, “It is as if there were no connection between the reality of Soviet Communism, in particular Stalin's Communism, and the opposition it engendered among some few intellectuals in the democracies. While on the one hand liberalism acknowledges and deplores the evil of the Communist dictatorship, on the other hand it treats anti-Communism as an object of its scorn.”

Trilling attracted the enmity of much of the left in the mid-fifties, when she served as an officer of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a coalition of anti-Communist liberals and conservatives. According to its first chairman, Sidney Hook, one of the organization's missions was “to expose Stalinism and Stalinist liberals wherever you find them.”

Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation, her old alma mater, and the author of Naming Names, a book about the McCarthy era, believes that the A.C.C.F. members were obsessed by the dangers posed by what Hook termed “Stalinist liberals.” “But there were many people who had long ago left the Communist Party who may or may not have been so-called Stalinists when they were inside it, and to be in it was not necessarily to be a Stalinist,” he said recently.

During the period when Trilling was associated with the A.C.C.F., however, she also succeeded in alienating many anti-Communists, by writing a closely argued essay for Partisan Review about the J. Robert Oppenheimer case, in which she demonstrated that nearly every charge brought against Oppenheimer (who, incidentally, was said to resemble her husband) could have been destroyed if his lawyers had had a better sense of history. Nonetheless, she believes, the liberal community, and especially the predominantly liberal literary community, never forgave her or her husband their anti-Communism. “Lionel was never invited to become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,” she said. “A few weeks after he died, the Academy called to offer him posthumous membership, but I told them that the offer had come too late, and declined.”

For all the Hobbesian breadth of her position, one could still wonder about the way Mrs. Trilling frames her critique of liberal irresponsibility. Responding to a 1967 article by Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books about the Central Intelligence Agency's funding of various anti-Communist organizations, in which he enumerated the many serious domestic problems the nation was facing—crumbling cities, polluted air and water, a weak educational system—which he felt might be better served by government funding, she felt compelled to fault Epstein for not subjecting the Soviet Union to a comparable scrutiny. Reading his article, she remarked in an essay of her own, you might conclude that “the air over the Soviet Union remains pure, the streams of Communism run clear and unpolluted.”

But shouldn't democracies be judged by their own standards? Americans were not responsible for either the pollution or the police-state realities of the Soviet Union and could not possibly have controlled them. When I suggested this the next time I saw her, Trilling shook her head. “No,” she said. “We were responsible for what was happening in East Europe. At Yalta, another huge chunk of the earth's surface was given away by a great liberal President, and what we did in our foreign policy continued to affect the fate of millions for years.”

During the 1972 Presidential election, a number of the Trillings' former radical friends, who had gradually migrated further and further to the right over the years, endorsed Richard Nixon for President, and one of them invited the Trillings to sign an endorsement for him that was to appear in the newspaper. They refused, and that moment marked a decisive break with a number of people who had been their friends for years, and who later became known as neo-conservatives. “They became right-wingers,” Trilling told me. “They don't care about equal rights, they don't care about the working class. They oppose sane abortion legislation. They thought Bush and Quayle were fine. I could never have followed them in those things. But, you know, it doesn't make me a good person because I think these things. I despised Oliver North and the way he took government matters into his own hands, but that doesn't make me a good person. Some liberals think that having liberal opinions makes them good people. I don't.”

Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a chief standard-bearer of neo-conservatism, has not spoken to her since they had a bitter falling-out over the accuracy of his portrait of Lionel Trilling in his book Breaking Ranks (1979), a political memoir. Back in the nineteen-fifties, “nobody regarded her as a liberal,” Podhoretz declared recently, in a telephone conversation. “Her ruling passion was anti-Communism and that's what she was hated for by some and admired for by others.”

Irving Kristol, now another neo-conservative stalwart, disagrees with Podhoretz. Kristol and his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, have known Mrs. Trilling since the nineteen-forties. “She is a Hubert Humphrey liberal,” he said recently. “We became more conservative, but she never did. Perhaps today's liberalism has moved to the left of her liberalism, I don't know. But she was always far more literary than political—she's a first-class literary and cultural critic.”

In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Trilling engaged in a number of skirmishes in print with members of the Family. One was with Mary McCarthy. (Both favored withdrawal from Vietnam, but Trilling predicted—rightly, as it turned out—that things would be far more difficult for the South Vietnamese in the postwar era than McCarthy believed they would be.) Another was with Robert Lowell (over the student takeover of Columbia), and a third, a not at all modest skirmish—more like Armageddon—was with Lillian Hellman.

The differences with Hellman grew out of Trilling's attack on the veracity of certain facts in Hellman's memoir Scoundrel Time. She was hardly alone in finding fault with Hellman's version of reality, but she was an early and an eloquent critic. Her fight with Hellman received so much publicity that several years ago she told an interviewer from the Times, “Sometimes I think my obituary is going to read, ‘Diana Trilling dies at 150. Widow of distinguished professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling. Engaged in controversy with Lillian Hellman.’” Hellman's disfavor, as Mary McCarthy's biographer, Carol Brightman, has noted, was “not something one wanted to encounter in the dark alley of American letters,” and their struggle remains fresh in Trilling's memory. She and Hellman had known each other for years before their well-publicized clash. “She was a very, very amusing woman, very charming, one of the most entertaining people I have ever known,” Trilling told me. “She gave lots of glamorous parties, and it was nice to be friends with her. As long as we stayed off politics. But she was not the largehearted, large-spirited woman I thought she was. Our difficulty arose in 1976, the summer after Lionel died. I asked Roger Donald, my editor at Little, Brown, who was going to be publishing a volume of my essays, whether he would be willing to publish them if I included a piece about Scoundrel Time, which I was sure I wasn't going to like. Little, Brown was, of course, also Lillian's publisher. He said, ‘No problem.’” (Roger Donald denies this.) “Well, that summer, Lillian, who had the whole Vineyard in her pocket, did everything to keep me friendly. I was invited everywhere. I have gone to the Vineyard or the Cape for years, and never once, except for that summer, have I worn a long, dressed-up sort of summer dress. That summer I had five, and they weren't enough. Well, at the end of the summer her book came out, and I thought it was loathsome, and I included in one of my essays four passages of criticism of it, and I put that essay in the volume called We Must March My Darlings. And Donald said I had to remove those four passages, and I said I would not remove them, and they broke my contract. I couldn't afford to sue. But I would have won. And then I put an enormous footnote that extends for several pages in the essay, and the book came out under the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich imprint.”

“Were there any further repercussions?” I asked.

“There certainly were. The word went out that you could not be a friend of Lillian's and still be a friend of mine. Norman Mailer, whom I'd been on friendly terms with for years—I'd even gone to a prizefight with him—modified a blurb he'd written for the jacket copy of my book so as to render it useless, and we ceased being friends. The next summer, at the Vineyard, I was absolutely shunned. And, you know, I was alone by then. I missed Lionel terribly. Actually, it forced me off the island. I didn't have any social life. I spend my vacations at the Cape now.”

Lionel Trilling's favorite of his wife's essays was an account she wrote for Partisan Review in 1959 of an evening she had spent with some faculty wives listening to Allen Ginsberg (a former student of Lionel's), Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso reading their poetry. It was called “The Other Night at Columbia: A Report from the Academy.” In it she subjects Ginsberg to a rather severe moral accounting but also questions her own assumptions about the values of a middle-class life. It's a complicated bit of writing, but its unreceptive attitude toward the embryonic Zeitgeist of the sixties was considered retrograde, and many people were irritated by it. Probably there are still those who, with the passing years, can forgive Mrs. Trilling her politics, forgive her her continuing doubts about the innocence of Alger Hiss, forgive her her insistence that in the case of Mrs. Harris it was actually Dr. Tarnower who was the victim, but cannot forgive her “The Other Night at Columbia.” When the article about him came out, Ginsberg sent Partisan Review a one-line note, saying, “The universe is a new flower.”

“What I'd meant to convey was that the world and our understanding of it was changing,” Ginsberg said recently. “I don't think she understood what she was hearing that night. I'm glad she paid attention to our poetry, but it would have been more useful if she had realized that the change in poetic form and concern was part of a new way of looking at the world. Our consciousness was getting beyond fights between Communists and anti-Communists, beyond the radical disillusion of the thirties intellectuals. Both the New and the Old Left became hypnotized by their battles. But we were trying to get beyond all that to an experience of the divine. We were worrying about the more universal police state that comes through technology.”

The last afternoon I saw Mrs. Trilling, which happened to be her eighty-eighth birthday, I asked her if, in retrospect, she might have come to think that her judgment of Ginsberg had been too harsh.

“Well, he thought of himself as outraging the academic community,” she said. “And if someone is coming to outrage your community you look at him and say, ‘What is he going to substitute for it?’ What I saw was a mixture of theatrics and infantilism and envy and wanting to get there himself—which now he has. I don't think that was a harsh judgment. When he was a student at Columbia, he was briefly thrown out of the school for writing ‘Fuck the Jews’ on a window, and it might be preferable for that not to be known now. And later on he was arrested for receiving stolen goods, and Lionel and other people at the university kept him out of jail. They did a very big job on the district attorney to get him a year of free medical help rather than a jail sentence. I felt sorry for him as you do for a lost kid. You can say it's condescension, but, you know, maturity condescends to youth. When the essay first came out, he told people he thought that it was ‘motherly,’ but at a dinner we were both invited to in the nineteen-seventies he told me that I was responsible for the junkies on the streets of New York. Well, that's what I have against him.” (Ginsberg had been talking about the C.I.A.'s involvement with the Far Eastern and Mediterranean drug trade.) “That's all I have against him. But there was affection for Ginsberg in that essay, too, and there was also enormous self-irony in the ending, which people seem to miss, or forget. I came home after that reading to this meeting of serious men, this respectable book club, and Auden was there and spoke condescendingly of Ginsberg. And I looked around the room and I thought, Is this any better than those rompered kids? No, it's not any better. And so I said to the room at large, ‘Lionel, he wrote a love poem to you, and it was beautiful. I liked it.’”

Mrs. Trilling had mentioned this poem in her memoir, and though I have a passing familiarity with Ginsberg's poetry, I had no recollection of the poem she referred to, and had trouble finding it in a collection of his poems, so I called Ginsberg to ask him for its title.

“There is no poem about him,” he said matter-of-factly. “The poem I read that night was one I'd written in Paris about a mystical vision I had about a lion in my living room. It's called, ‘The Lion for Real,’ and begins with a quote from the nineteenth-century French poet Tristan Corbière: ‘Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative.’ I guess she misheard it. I visited them for years afterward, but I never brought it up; I thought it was better to just let it go.”

I told Mrs. Trilling what Ginsberg had said.

She shrugged, and said dryly, “Ah, was I wrong? He should have told me I was wrong. But, in any case, the fact is that that night I was trying to throw a bombshell into the respectability of my home. I was writing from the point of view of somebody who was trying to live in two worlds at once—the imaginative world of bad children and the ruling world of good, ordinary grownups.”

Mrs. Trilling was interrupted by the ringing of the phone, which she kept on the floor at her feet. It was her friend Dorothy Calingaert, who was calling to wish her a happy birthday.

“Oh, Dorothy. Oh, thanks so much. Well, you made it. I made it. I guess we're the oldest living ornaments.”

As soon as she hung up, the phone rang again. It was her granddaughters, who are two and six, also calling to wish her a happy birthday and to discuss the delayed celebration they would have in a few weeks, when she planned to visit them.

“Yes, darling, I can't wait to see you.”

That call was followed by a long succession of others from well-wishers, and after a while my mind drifted away from the subject we had been discussing before the phone started ringing. Mrs. Trilling's had not. Leaning back on the couch with her arms outspread after returning the phone to its cradle, she said, without missing a beat, “This is the unresolved question that imaginative people will always have, in every time of life, in every time of the world: Where do I belong, and what price do I pay for where I choose to stand?”

For all its rich allusion and social alertness, there is a strong feeling of grief in The Beginning of the Journey: for her husband, for her vanished friends, and for the robust intellectual climate in which she once thrived. “Today, when the intellectual world as I knew it in the middle decades of the century no longer exists, I deeply mourn its loss,” she writes. “I loved intellectual talk: the easy discursiveness, the free range of reference, the refusal of received ideas, the always-ready wit. I cherished the exigency of the intellectual life as it used to be lived.”

The finality of such statements, coupled with the physical difficulties of Mrs. Trilling's life, led me to assume that her memoir would be her last work. I was mistaken. That afternoon, she told me that on the morning of the first day I visited her she had just started a new book, a series of recollections of places and people, and she had been working on it every day. A mighty warrior does not tarry in her tent.